A fragile assembly: Author and screenwriter’s Neel Patel’s debut collection of short stories

I f You See Me, Don’t Say Hi is screenwriter Neel Patel’s debut collection of short stories. It is tempting to classify it as a book about the Indian-American experience, or to follow the blurb’s example in stating that it “examines the collisions of old world and new world, small town and big city, traditional beliefs and modern rituals”. In a 2018 interview, New York-based Patel himself gives us the sense that his collection is addressed at the problem of representation in the popular media, suggesting that “as people of colour we (Indian-Americans) only get to be one or two things — very little is known about our interior lives”. Going into Patel’s book, it’s easy to begin with the impression that there is some kind of an agenda at play.

Representation is a complicated business. When art or literature tries to engage with the question of cultural diversity, it is important to pay attention to how this engagement plays out. Who are the people at the centre of your narrative, and how do you treat their non-mainstream identities, aside from the fact of their being non-mainstream in the first place? In this case, what is an Indian-American, other than an Indian-American? It is this question that Patel masterfully tackles. Indianness apart, his characters are deeply complex, sprung as they are of a frayed, off-kilter social world that has long outgrown the binaries of old and new, and tradition and modernity.

Patel’s 11 stories are all given to us in first person, by a set of mostly male, mostly Gujarati, mostly Hindu narrators (another reason it may be best to not associate this book too closely with the blanket term “Indian”). They tell their stories in a grave, distant monotone, devoid entirely of humour, and suffused with such a deep sense of tragedy that even the most innocuous first sentence holds the weight of a deep, hopeless foreboding. The title story of the collection opens with the ominous line “Deepak was my older brother, six years to be exact, which made him sixteen when I was ten.”

In general, we are dealing with fairly young characters — even when a story is recounted by a 40-something mother of two, the period of her life that we are concerned with is her youth. The home is a key site of analysis. What happens to ideas of race, class, custom and masculinity when they are refracted through the lens of family? How do they shape the person you become? In World Famous and Radha, Krishna , we follow the arc of a relationship hounded by the shame and censure of a community. In The Taj Mahal , we witness the wild unravelling of a woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her incredibly successful parents.

Patel excels at engineering sudden moments of implosive conflict. Many of the stories are centred around one thing — a person, or a relationship, something that promises to transform the protagonist, or grant him a certain kind of grace from life, before it collapses in the most devastating manner possible. In Hare Rama, Hare Krishna , Samir’s first boyfriend, Jordan, comes to him at a moment when he is watching his parent’s marriage fall apart and losing his faith in love. In These Things Happen , Venkat falls desperately, frenetically in love with the chronically depressed Chloe, whose energy and sexuality give brief meaning to an otherwise lonely and goalless existence. One of the most powerful stories in the collection, Hey Loser explores the fragile and toxic psyche of a man whose love for his ex-girlfriend sends him tumbling into neurotic quasi-stalker territory. Patel is interested in the arbitrariness of love, how it can lead and simultaneously mislead, and what happens to its value once its object has disappeared from your life.

If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi; Neel Patel; Penguin; Fiction; ₹399

If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi engages effortlessly with the complexity of individual identity. Patel’s politics are steady and strong, but his touch is deft. The experiences of his characters are only gestures towards the racial, historical and economic forces that underpin them — he respects his audience too much to spoon-feed them.

But it’s worth mentioning that aspects of the book’s production feel a little out of sync with this general subtlety. Whether it’s story titles like God of Destruction and Radha, Krishna , the panels of brown on the cover, or the overenthusiastic blurb that tells us right up front that the characters are about to “subvert our expectations”, the book is weighed down by patently unnecessary references to its cultural importance. The reader is left with little space in which to form her own impressions.

It is to the writer’s credit that in spite of this, the stories speak for themselves. The raw, unflinching drama is addictive. Once you’re two or three stories in, Patel’s range — his skill with writing emotion — begins to reveal itself. Whole lives materialise.

Dakshayini Suresh is a Bengaluru-based freelance writer